Cricket Scandal Rocks Pakistan

Monday

Aug 30, 2010 at 5:18 AM

For many Pakistanis, weighed down by violence and floods, a betting scandal was the final straw.

JOHN F. BURNS

LONDON — For many Pakistanis, weighed down by their country’s descent into biblical levels of violence and flooding, there was a sense of a final straw in the crude betting scandal that broke over the weekend around the Pakistani cricket team, whose players have long been idols with feet of clay in a nation with few exemplars elsewhere to buoy vulnerable spirits.

Even as the Pakistani team faced humiliating defeat by England in a game played on the hallowed grasses of Lord’s ground in London, traditionally regarded as the home of cricket, Scotland Yard detectives interrogated three of the team’s key players — including the captain and an 18-year-old novice who has been the team’s star performer in its series with England — in their hotel on Saturday night.

The detectives told team managers that they had been tipped to a “spot fixing” scandal that was about to be splashed across the front page of Sunday’s News of the World, Britain’s most widely circulated tabloid.

Spot-fixing refers to a form of corruption that has plagued cricket, soccer and other sports in Europe, particularly Britain, the former colonial power in what is now Pakistan. Instead of bribing players to fix matches outright, considered too risky for the Asian betting syndicates involved, the schemes often rely on fixing details of play that — while not necessarily affecting a game’s outcome — can attract millions of dollars of bets across Asia.

The News of the World, one of the tabloids owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation media conglomerate, ran its top Sunday story under a banner headline that read: “Caught!”

The paper said that an undercover reporter posing as a wealthy businessman planning to bet on the Lord’s game had paid the equivalent of more than $230,000 to a London-based “fixer” who claimed to have seven members of the 11-man Pakistani team “in his pocket” and four who had specifically agreed to join in the scheme.

On its Web site the newspaper accompanied its story with a video showing the man suspected of being the fixer, Mazhar Majid, 35, sitting in a London hotel room with stacked bundles of British pound sterling notes on a table. Scotland Yard said it had arrested Mr. Majid on suspicion of fraud before interviewing the cricketers.

The video appears to show Mr. Majid telling the undercover reporter details of exactly when during Thursday and Friday’s match at Lord’s, Pakistan’s bowlers — cricket’s equivalent of baseball pitchers — would deliver three “no balls,” cricket terminology that refers to balls ruled foul by umpires because the bowler’s front foot falls beyond a chalk line on the 22-yard pitch at the moment of delivery.

As the game developed, the no-balls were delivered by the Pakistani team’s star bowlers, Mohammed Amir and Mohammed Asif, at exactly the moments in the game specified by Mr. Majid in his video exchange with the News of the World reporter.

“I’m telling you, if you play this right, you’re going to make a lot of money, believe me,” Mr. Majid told the undercover team, according to the newspaper.

When the cricket match in London resumed on Sunday, 12 hours after the Scotland Yard detectives had interviewed the two bowlers and the team captain, Salman Butt, and impounded their cellphones, it was doubtful whether the Pakistani players would even play.

But play they did, and lose, by a heavy margin. Although the three Pakistani players were on the field, several of England’s former cricket captains, now working as television commentators, said they suspected it might be a long time, if ever, before they were selected to play for Pakistan again.

As the Pakistan players returned to their hotel after the game, a knot of Pakistani fans banged on the team’s bus, and cried their dismay.

“It’s absolutely disgraceful,” one man shouted. Another man, interviewed by the BBC, appeared to verge on tears.

“The cricket was only good thing that was happening to us, what with the floods and everything else,” he said.

The captain, Mr. Butt, was evasive when asked at a postgame news conference if the paper’s allegations were true. “I am saying that every person on my team gave 100 percent,” he said.

But Pakistan’s embattled government lost no time in reacting, and not to offer any defense. President Asif Ali Zardari, who spent years in Pakistani prisons over the past decade over allegations that he embezzled millions while his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was prime minister in the 1990s, said through a spokesman that he had “directed that he be kept posted” on the police inquiry in London. He ordered the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, a government appointee, to submit a personal report.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani was more direct. Visiting his hometown, Multan, he told reporters that the allegations against the cricketers had made Pakistan’s 170 million people “hang their heads in shame.”

For Pakistanis, the allegations were a fresh body blow. Although their faith in the cricket team has been repeatedly undermined by years of scandal and factionalism within the team, cricket remains hugely popular, as it does in neighboring India, which has faced similar cricket scandals.

In both countries, cricket outstrips all other popular entertainment, except possibly Bollywood films. Former cricket stars like Imran Khan, who led Pakistan to victory over England in the final of the 1992 world cricket championship before entering politics, are enduring household names.

Even with vast areas of Pakistan under water, television sets in unaffected areas, in households, cafes and community centers, have drawn eager followers throughout the summer to follow Pakistan’s progress in two separate series played in England, first against Australia, for many years the top team, and subsequently against England.

In both series, the Pakistani players performed erratically, mixing episodes of brilliance with almost crass ineptitude, causing many involved in cricket, as officials and commentators, to question whether more than just the no-balls had been fixed in the four-game series with England.

In the newspaper’s video, Mr. Majid boasted that he could fix other details of the game, including the number of runs scored in any period of play.

Andrew Strauss, England’s captain, was asked after the end of the match whether he worried that other aspects of the series, which England won 3-1, had been subverted. “Hopefully, those fears are unfounded,” he said.

Adding to the woes of Pakistan’s supporters at home, the team has been unable to play in Pakistan for the past 18 months, since the Dubai-based International Cricket Board banned other national teams from playing in Pakistan after a terrorist attack on Sri Lanka’s team in March 2009 in the city of Lahore.

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